Piece Of Pierce

A completely stupid, but amusing little review for OHM. There was also a whole bit about ha'pennies, farthings, tanners and other Victorian coinage, that the editor cut and I shall too. It was, frankly, agonisingly unfunny nonsense.

SPIRITUALIZED/ DAVID VINER - Brookes SU, 5/2/04

As I walk into Brookes signs warn, "This show will contain extreme strobe lights". Excellent! Strobes they indeed had, bloody great big ones too. But before the meltdown, David Viner kicked off with some Dylanish songs on his guitar. That's "Dylanish" as in "no discernible melody and featuring lyrics about whiskey" as opposed to "towering musical genius". Glad we cleared that up. He's not bad, but can't seem to get into the zone, and all his whoops and hollers, which should be spine-tinglingly visceral, just sound silly. One song proclaims, "It's nobody's business what I do". Let's keep it that way, eh?

Jason Pierce's lazer guided troubadours have been enraging record buyers for some time now: some of their music is mercurial, huge, and life-affirmingly psychedelic, whilst some is stodgy indie-gospel, as over-produced and underwhelming as any 80s Pink Floyd or Van Morrison LP. Tonight's show thankfully veers towards the former category for the most part. There are shadowy hunched figures, a glockenspiel, racks of effects pedals, swathes of keyboard schmuzz, hypnotic drums and litres of dry ice. Oh, and those bloody big strobes.

Grandiloquent music on an epic scale - how can you lose? You can't, really, but even as we stood, eyes closed, bathed in sound, the nagging worry was that Spiritualized, with zillions of pounds worth of stage equipment, can't quite reach the peaks that Spacemen 3 scaled on tuppence ha'penny.

There were joyful moments: "Electricity", the opener; the new single (though surely it's basically "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream"?); the "Cop Shoot Cop" saxfest; "Come Together", one of the few songs ever where the audience sings along to the guitar part, not the vocal; the segue between "Let It Glide" and "Let It Flow", which settled into three minutes of abstract tones before being born again in a new guise, like Dr Who. But there weren't quite enough of these moments to change this from a good gig to a glorious gig, and sometimes the bloody big strobes were more intoxicating than the music. In honour of this I shall summatrise in strobe:

It w s a pr t y gr at g g, b t did 't re ch th ps ch del c he gh s it co ld h v , wh c is a p ty. Tr p y, h h?